Daily Stoic Entry #126: Am I Seeking the Beauty of Human Excellence?
May 6th, 2022
Follow along with my personal daily stoic journal, unfiltered, unedited (except for some spelling mistakes).
Morning Reflection:
Considering the question, it’s important to keep in your own mind your definitions of beauty and human excellence. To me I’m not seeking physical beauty though I care about physical health which relates to that beauty. But what I’m mostly seeking in beauty is to cultivate inner values, the strength of character. That’s the beauty we’re after. Thus, beauty predates human excellence because I think the strength of character comes before the pursuit of excellence or it keeps you going in the pursuit.
Evening Reflection:
Human excellence I find a little trickier to define because it’s different for everyone. I can point to examples of extreme human excellence like Michael Jordan or David Goggins but that’s a bit of out of reach (or not). The point is to make small adjustments and improvements along the way towards that idea of excellence.
Title prompts are taken from The Daily Stoic Journal by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman.